We use cookies to enhance your experience on our website. By clicking 'continue' or by continuing to use our
website, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. You can change your cookie settings at any time.

For a word to be considered for inclusion in the OED, it must first be added to the dictionary’s ‘watch list’ database. Contributions to this watch list come from an enormous variety of sources – from the OED’s own reading programmes to crowdsourcing appeals with the general public, and increasingly from automated monitoring and analysis of massive databases of language in use.

The OED’s editors
consider thousands of word suggestions from these sources every year, reviewing
each and every one. Words that have not yet accumulated enough evidence for
permanent record in the OED remain on
the watch list for continued monitoring, while suggestions for words with
sufficiently sustained and widespread use are assigned to an editor.

Editors begin by reviewing the information gathered so far for
their assigned word before embarking on their own research to trace the word’s
development. This research might lead them to search newspaper archives, online
forums, academic studies, magazines, law tracts, recipe books, or social media
for published evidence of the word. If a key example is available in a library
or archive beyond digital access, editors also have the opportunity to enlist
the help of the OED’s network of
researchers, who are based at institutions around the world, to track down the
elusive example.

Once an editor has pieced together a detailed picture of the
word, they begin to draft the dictionary entry to record it in the OED. For words without an existing OED entry, this begins with the word
itself – called the headword
– and includes its pronunciation, forms, etymology, definition, example
quotations, and any other senses or associated phrases it may have. For new
senses of existing words, these are included in their chronological position in
the entry, with the definition and example quotations.

This work involves several specialist teams at the OED, such as the pronunciation editors,
who create the audio
files and transcriptions that reflect a word’s most common pronunciations, and
the bibliographers, who review
the quotations to ensure that sources are cited accurately.

Once the dictionary entry has been signed off by each team,
it is passed on to the finalization team, which includes the dictionary’s Chief
and Deputy Chief Editors, for the final stamp of approval before it takes its
place in the OED.

Completed entries are published in quarterly updates on OED Online, and each update is accompanied by release notes looking at key themes and notable new additions from the latest crop of words.